


With Nothing but Our Hopes Tied to These Soles

by theradiointukyshead



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Post-3x10, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 10:15:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5782237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theradiointukyshead/pseuds/theradiointukyshead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of vignettes as FitzSimmons escape to the open road, even if it’s just for a little while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Nothing but Our Hopes Tied to These Soles

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr on Jan. 17, 2016.

_“Run away with me.”_

_“Just for a while?”_

_“Yes. Before the heartache catches up with you.”_

_“I’m afraid I’m not fast enough.”_

_“I’ll help you pick up the pace.”_

-

Fitz downs the rest of his Monster and blinks the sleep away. It’s stale, but it’s not like he notices, not nowadays, anyhow. Besides, there are worse chemicals to consume to stay awake. He knows, because he’s tried quite a range of them, fought clean _and_ dirty to stay in control of his thoughts. Sleep terrifies him.

And Jemma, too, but right now she’s fast asleep in the passenger seat. Or at least she’s pretending to be, just to keep him from worrying. It gnaws at his insides, the way she refuses to let anyone see her fall apart, but if the pretense is her way of coping, then who is he not to play along, tame his heart to act his part and say his lines?

So he grips the steering wheel a little bit tighter and lets out a shaky breath. “I know you’re sleeping so you can’t hear this,” he lies, and the corner of his mouth twitches, half mirth, half pain. “But I want you to know that there is grace in undoing. I just wish you’d allow me to see it in yours.”

She stirs, turns to face the window, though her eyes are still shut. There’s something glistening reflected from the glass, but he chooses to chalk it up to the headlight of a car a few yards behind.

-

He shakes her awake an hour later, when the first rays of sunshine are just beginning to avalanche out from beyond feathered treetops.

“Dawn’s breaking,” says he. “Thought you might want to see it.” _After everything, you deserve this much_ , he thinks, but doesn’t add. Instead, he reaches to lower both sun visors.

She sits up, gives him the softest of smiles. In this kind of light her hair is almost golden, but even the glow cannot lighten those shadows under her eyes. Delicate contours, papery lips, hers is a soft beauty only to be touched with reverence, superimposed against the glass window and all the miles they leave behind.

He snaps his focus back on the road. For a few seconds she exists to him as a streak of never-ending light.

-

They are at Grand Central Station and she has somehow charmed two street musicians into letting her and Fitz play for an hour to see who can earn more money. They each take to a separate corner, him shouldering a violin and her with a guitar slung behind her back, the half-grin tugging at her mouth like she simply can’t resist a good competition.

It’s hardly a competition – he thinks sourly as he bows away a suite from some dusty corner of his memory – when he clearly doesn’t stand a chance. Jemma Simmons is not a polymath; she specializes. But what she does know she excels at. When it comes to musical talent, she kicks his ass all the way into next week.

Not that he’d mind, of course. Not when she’s this unrestrained, unthinking. Not when she’s this free. He’s stopped playing a long while ago to watch her instead. It’s quite mesmerizing, the way her fingers dance between frets and strings, light as tendrils of smoke, and he briefly wonders maybe that’s why it is so effortless for her to reach in between his ribs and grab hold of his heart.

He blurts that out later, when they are on a bench somewhere and their shadows are long enough to coalesce into the edge of the Hudson.

“Maybe that’s why I keep hurting you,” she laughs, but it doesn’t touch her eyes. “I mean, look at these callouses!” And she holds out her left hand, with fingers sore and slightly hardened from the occasional guitar playing.

He takes her hand, places a kiss on each fingertip. “They’re there to remind you you’ve created something beautiful.”

-

She finds out about his stacks of Monster, that’s when they stop taking turns driving at night.

(“You need to sleep, Fitz.”

“And you need to stop pretending that you do.”)

In the end, they get a motel room where there are two twin beds, and wake up with two pillows soaked through with sweats and tears.

Tonight the rain is full of ghosts. He’s listening to its tap and sigh in the darkened room, a distant sandstorm of death and decay whipping his face still, when he hears her stir in her bed.

“I keep waiting for someone to blame me, but no one does,” she begins, and it’s so quiet that at first he mistakes it for another tremulous gust of wind outside the window.

“They know you did nothing wrong. Survival is messy, Jemma. They understand that.”

But he knows her. He knows this isn’t enough. She won’t allow herself to get rid of the guilt. All he can do is hold his hands over the ears of her heart so she can’t hear it howl.

He turns to her, sees the frail outline of her, and it is trembling with each sob that she refuses to let out. It strikes him then just how startlingly small and _human_ she is, how that much human can contain _that_ much humanity.

“How do you not overflow, Jemma?” The question escapes him before he can help it.

There’s half a pause. “I do. I have.”

“… Well that’s what I’m here for.”

She seems to ruminate this for a second. Then the mattress shifts and he finds her curling up next to him, her head resting on his pillow. She’s so close he can count all the faint scars on her face even in the dark.

“There’s grace in undoing,” she says and places a hand against his heart. The traitorous thing beats on. For her. Always for her.

She falls asleep first, and he soon follows. The next morning there’s only one pillow soaked through with sweats and tears.

-

They’re on a backroad in some podunk town when the car suddenly stops. He pops the hood and fiddles for a while, but eventually plops back into his seat.

“Can’t you fix it?”

There’s a wispy smile on his face. “I can. But it is beautiful tonight, there’s no hurry to get back, and we have a ticket to the stars.”

It rains. Rather spectacularly.

He sulks, but she’s content just to crank the radio up and sing along to some top 40 hits. She’s bouncing slightly to a tune, to the whisper of rain against the window. She’s silvery and whole in a way starlight can never be, and as he watches her he idly thinks that perhaps tiny miracles can take a corporeal form or settle into a heart.  

He wants to say it, can feel it in his marrow, but it seems painfully inadequate. Instead, he tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear and sighs. “I think we don’t have enough verbs in the English language.”

She laughs a little, breathless. “What?”

_Universe, for example, should be a verb._

_I universe you._

_As in, I view you with ardor and wonder. You are extraordinary and I go to bed believing maybe I’m not just ordinary myself._

_I am my best and I am my worst in the unlikely existence of you. I suppose that’s my privilege and my downfall._

_Oh god, I look at you and sometimes I feel grand, sometimes I feel insignificant, but above all, I feel hope._

_In short –_

“I universe you.”


End file.
